Overview
A standard booking flow using TripBuilder starts in Discovery, where the user selects a previously defined template (or starts from scratch), followed by the selection of different products in Planner and finally, in Checkout, traveller details (and possibly payment details) are collected and the itinerary components booked.
Since the time between product selection in Planner (with availability confirmed) and booking is not close to immediate, to reduce the risk of failures, a re-check of availability is also part of Checkout before booking starts.
For selected flight offers, if the offer is older than 10 minutes when availability is checked, TripBuilder searches for the same flight again to validate current availability and price before booking. This selected-offer refresh helps reduce booking failures caused by expired supplier offers.
However, many itineraries require additional/significant time to build (e.g. due to iterations with travellers). Re-checking availability directly in Planner avoids an artificial move to Checkout to confirm component availability.
How to re-check Availability in Planner?
This feature is available in both TO-Tools and TA-Tools menus with Re-check availability.
Clicking on the menu option will present the Re-check Availability screen, where the user can re-check the components present in the itinerary by clicking on the Re-check Availability button. If a re-check action was previously conducted, the last results are also presented.
Note: The selected-flight-offer refresh applies to supported Connect API flight suppliers such as Peakwork and AERTiCKET Hub. Flight offers checked within 10 minutes and quick bookings proceed without this additional refresh. SoftConEx availability checks use their standard behaviour and do not perform this selected-offer refresh.
Triggering an availability check can take up to 90 seconds, depending on the speed at which the supplier systems send back the availability information.
Note: While components in the itinerary from inventory and external suppliers will be re-checked, ad-hoc components will not. These are also not referenced in the results list as they are considered static and impossible to determine changes.
Once all components have been checked, results are presented with an indication of whether they are still available. If unavailable, the user needs to get back to Planner by clicking on the Back to Trip Planner at the top left of the screen.
In Planner, in the Notification area, all remarks on unavailable components are presented with an action to adjust them. Also, in the Planned Itinerary section (right side of the screen), unavailable items are marked with a red circle and white exclamation mark.
When navigating to an unavailable component (such as the rental car example below), this is also highlighted in red.
As unavailable components are removed from the itinerary or replaced by available components, the warnings in the Notification and Planned Itinerary areas are progressively removed.
Note: Triggering a "re-check availability" updates the prices of each component in the itinerary. This update considers the FX rates and the markup rules defined and valid at that time, which may differ from the ones initially applied on itinerary instantiation. If a refreshed selected flight offer returns a changed price, the re-check result displays the updated price information and the itinerary price is updated according to the availability re-check result.